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“A solid first step is for gun owners to recognize that infringements like the GCA of 1968 must never be tolerated by anyone who believes in the right to self-defense.”
Jose Nino, The 1968 Gun Control Act: 50 Years of Federal Gun Control

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I keep reading all of these stories about how dangerous and deadly the mythical AR15 is. How this monstrous killing machine should should never fall into civilian hands. The photo above is of an AR15, legally speaking. This small piece of metal is legally the firearm itself. I do not understand the fear.

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Why — at a time in our history when guns were readily available, when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements — was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted?
– Walter Williams

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“Which brings us back to gun control, something countless liberal pundits and Democratic congresspeople are breathlessly demanding right now. How on earth could anyone believe both that Trump is a fascist and that it’s a good idea for a federal government he runs to take guns away from law-abiding citizens? If Trump is a budding Mussolini—let alone something worse—then you shouldn’t want to give him the power required to wage a war on guns. Keep in mind that many gun owners are people of color, who would be (and frequently have been) disproportionately affected by enforcement of new gun laws. Indeed, if Trump wanted to further damage immigrants and communities of color, eroding their rights and jailing their men, he could find no more powerful tool than a license to confiscate guns.” – Robby Soave in If You Think Trump Is a Fascist, You Should Oppose Gun Controlhttp://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2017/10/daniel-zimmerman/imi-systems-quote-day-please-dont-confuse-left-reality-gun-control/

When the lines of these categories are blurred and our understanding of what constitutes violence is so contorted, it becomes possible to unironically argue that the answer to speech you don’t like is hurting people.

It’s shocking that he makes the same case that the video makes that he is attempting to refute. He, like so many of his generation, confusedly assumes that somehow the video is a call for violence. If the young man understood English, he would see that the video makes the very case against violence that he mistakenly makes against his malformed idea of what the the video communicates.

The fact that young Christopher Machol does not like the NRA does not mean that the NRA constitutes a call to violence. If young Christopher understood language, he might understand that the natural right to be armed (protected by the Second Amendment) is a safeguard against violence.

We uphold the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, a natural inalienable right that predates the Constitution and is secured by the Second Amendment. Lawful gun ownership enables Americans to exercise their God-given right of self- defense for the safety of their homes, their loved ones, and their communities.

We salute the Republican Congress for defending the right to keep and bear arms by preventing the President from installing a new liberal majority on the Supreme Court. The confirmation to the Court of additional anti-gun justices would eviscerate the Second Amendment’s fundamental protections. Already, local officials in the nation’s capital and elsewhere are defying the Court’s decisions upholding an individual right to bear arms as affirmed by the Supreme Court in Heller and McDonald.

We support firearm reciprocity legislation to recognize the right of law-abiding Americans to carry firearms to protect themselves and their families in all 50 states. We support constitutional carry statutes and salute the states that have passed them. We oppose ill-conceived laws that would restrict magazine capacity or ban the sale of the most popular and common modern rifle. We also oppose any effort to deprive individuals of their right to keep and bear arms without due process of law.

We condemn frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers and the current Administration’s illegal harassment of firearm dealers. We oppose federal licensing or registration of law-abiding gun owners, registration of ammunition, and restoration of the ill-fated Clinton gun ban. We call for a thorough investigation — by a new Republican administration — of the deadly “Fast and Furious” operation perpetrated by Department of Justice officials who approved and allowed illegal sales of guns to known violent criminals.

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If you are one of the people who continues to lie about guns in civilian hands NOT saving lives, then you are willfully ignorant, a deceiver, or stupid. I do not like attributing any of those to people, but one must be true. (If I have overlooked a possibility, please let me know.)

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Democide – “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder.”

Many people think that every tragic death caused by a criminal with a gun or accidental firearms related death means that access to guns by law abiding citizens should be more tightly controlled and restricted. Often these people view those who argue against restricting firearms ownership in any way as monstrous and uncaring.

The main reason we view the basic human right of private arms ownership as essential to human thriving andfreedom is that we don’t view the debate through the lens of each tragedy, but through the lens of history.

The end of last week a study in the American Journal of Public Health claimed that there were more police feloniously killed in states that had more guns. The study got extensive news coverage at the TV networks such as NBC News, newspapers such as the Chicago Sun-Times, and international coverage such the UK Guardian. Yet, it took just a couple of minutes to read the paper and realize that the empirical work was done in a very non-standard way. There is a big benefit to using so-called panel data, where you can more accurately account for differences in crime rates across states or over time. This method is called “fixed effects.” Strangely the authors, David Swedler, Molly M. Simmons, Francesca Dominici, and David Hemenway, only control for the differences across states and not over time.

A couple of simple examples show why other studies on crime take into account these factors

Take the differences across places. Many people point out that the UK has both a lower gun ownership rate and a lower homicide rate than the US. Some use this to claim that gun control causes crime rates to fall. But the homicide rate actually went up by 50 percent in the eight years after the 1997 handgun ban went into effect. The homicide rate was still lower than that in the US, but there were lots of reasons it was lower to begin with, not the handgun ban.

The same point applies over time. Suppose a state passes a gun control law at the same time that crime rates are falling nationally. It would be a mistake to attribute the overall drop in national crime rates to the law that got passed. To account for that concern, researchers normally see whether the drop in crime rate for the state that had the change is greater or less than the overall national change.

Unfortunately, the American Journal of Public Health study doesn’t account for this last concern, and it makes a big huge. Here is a simple version of their regression explaining the number of police officers feloniously killed over the years from 1996 to 2013, but without accounting for the time effects that we just discussed. Before going through the results, the media coverage of this study is incorrect in claiming that more guns are associated with more police killings. What the journal article actually measures is not the gun ownership, but the percentage of suicides committed with guns (fsdsuicides). This regression looks at the total number of police feloniously murdered with their measure of “gun ownership” and the number of police officers. In this regression it appears that a one percentage point increase in the percent of suicides committed with guns increase, there is a significant 1.8 percent increase in the total number of police killed.

Unlike those who would use statistics to deny you your birthright, John Lott includes all of the math for you to review and refute.